What do you want to achieve with your Neighbourhood Plan?
- What are the key issues for your community and what are your aims and objectives
- How can policies in your Neighbourhood Plan help you to address local issues and achieve your ambitions?
Think about:
- how you want your places to evolve over time
- what growth does your community need
- what should change (and what should be protected) to make your area a better place to live?
Meeting statutory requirements
Neighbourhood plans contain land-use planning policies, they can only influence development that requires planning permission. It’s important to remember that all Neighbourhood Plan policies must:
- Have regard to national policy
- Contribute to the achievement of sustainable development
- Conform with strategic policies in the Cornwall Local Plan. This may include the following, where relevant:
- Be compatible with Environmental legislation (Strategic Environment Assessment)
You can learn about each of the stages and activities required to produce a neighbourhood plan in the documents below:
Neighbourhood Planning A Simple Guide for Councillors
Producing a neighbourhood plan can be a complex and long process. To keep track of targets and work completed you can use the Locality project planner tool. This will help you to see how each phase fits into the statutory stages of neighbourhood planning. We have inserted some extra comments so that you can see how this is supported by Cornwall Council.
Producing a neighbourhood plan is a significant undertaking and requires a lot of time and effort, usually by volunteers to deliver. In our experience, they take an average of around 5 years from designation to completion. The policies in a neighbourhood plan gather weight as the plan moves through the process. Once the neighbourhood plan has been successfully examined and supported at referendum, it will form part of the local development plan. This will then be used alongside National and Cornwall planning policies to make decisions on planning applications in the neighbourhood area.
Email us at neighbourhoodplanning@cornwall.gov.uk to discuss your neighbourhood plan.
Support we offer to Neighbourhood Planning Groups
We have a wealth of knowledge and experience in neighbourhood planning and can offer you free support.
Set up a Neighbourhood Plan Steering Group
Your Steering Group will be responsible for producing your neighbourhood plan. It is important that your Steering Group sets out how it will interact and report back to the Qualifying Body.
You must apply to us to designate your neighbourhood plan area. Normally this will be the same as your town or parish boundary but you could choose to produce a joint neighbourhood plan with a neighbouring parish and have a wider boundary.
You will able to apply for funding to help you to produce your neighbourhood plan.
Prepare your Neighbourhood Plan
How to produce a neighbourhood plan. Engagement, data and evidence, vision and objectives and drafting planning policies.
Submit your Neighbourhood Plan
How to carry out your Regulation 14 Pre-submission consultation and publicity. Documents you will need to prepare for your Regulation 15 Submission with templates to help you to do this.
We will cover the costs for an Independent Examiner to review your neighbourhood plan.
If more than 50% of people who vote in the referendum support the neighbourhood plan it will become part of the statutory development plan for the area.
Making the Neighbourhood Plan (Adoption), Monitoring and Management
How to assess planning applications, add priority projects and review your neighbourhood plan.
Neighbourhood Plan (NDP) guide notes and templates
The guidance in this section gives advice on HOW to produce an NDP. It has useful templates which will help you with some of the key documents that you will need to produce to support your neighbourhood plan.
